Archives: January 2009

I can’t pick up the local news without reading about some f**king Caucasians in some break and enter or stoush or something. Now here they are giving the country a bad name just by being crass and stupid. Why can’t these people just assimilate?

I almost missed Blog for Choice day– I haven’t been checking the internets dutifully enough, and we’ve been out all day – by “we” I mean the two kids and me – pretending to be tourists in our own town.

So there’s only time for a smash-and-grab effort, but here’s some thoughts:

Finally, for laughs, here’s proof that wingnuts can hold two mutually exclusive concepts as gospel truth simultaneously; which, as someone once said, can lead to some very serious pain in the membrane. Here the two mutually exclusive concepts are (1) Children of female-headed single parent families (a.k.a. “broken homes”), especially if they aren’t white, are all doomed to end up as crackheads dependent on the state! and (2) Every sperm is sacred, because you never know which child of a female-headed single parent family might end up as POTUS! Choose one of them, guys, just one of them, you can’t have both.

-Bonus opposing concepts: Wingnuts think Obama is the spawn of Satan, but they’ll use him as an example of why every sperm is sacred! …eh?

Nowhere in your article did I see any mention of one of the most problematic breeding grounds for violent and sexist behaviour: football. The milieu and culture in which your husband is an elder statesman.

I’m not suggesting for a moment here that Ron is part of the problem. What I do suggest is that he uses his remaining years to do the valuable and necessary work of changing the warped culture that has grown up around footballers and the kind of young men who would aspire to be like them. These people are the poster children for the very things you complain are destroying our culture.

A pack mentality, greed, consumer madness, lack of a social conscience and drugs — especially ice — were to blame for an increase in violence, she told The Age.

It seems the AFL and other football codes have made some efforts to address this culture over the last few years, but it looks as if it’s an uphill battle against the enormous pressure for young blokes to interpret manliness as drunkenness, loutishness and treating women like toilets. Some people excuse this with some misty-eyed notion of a “tradition” of “larrikinism”, which was hard enough to live with in the streets of colonial Victoria but has simply morphed into a gangland version of the Lifestyles of the rich, famous and thick. And little Jamie and Brayden from Footymad Primary are picking up on it. Plenty of parents don’t want their kids playing Aussie Rules football for that very reason. Think about it.

It’s time Ron threw his considerable weight behind all AFL campaigns which are trying to address the problems you complain about – drugs, violence, attitude towards women. He has standing in the football world and he should use it.

The other day, I was pegging out some washing and saw Ollie scratching himself on a piece of trellis which is holding up a jasmine vine. I didn’t take much notice, and then someone said, “oooh, look at Ollie. I think he’s been stung by a bee.”

So, the inaugration of President Obama is not quite two days away, and what does the AGE opinion page have to say about it? Well, just a shortish piece from a guy called Steve Harris who thinks that it isn’t all that historically significant really, because Obama isn’t really a proper black person anyway. And even if he was a “proper” black person, everybody knows racism is over. Because Steve has gone from being a white dude in a suit editing both the AGE and the Herald Sun, to a suit in the AFL – that bastion of social progress – to running a think tank, or rather a marketing company. And as far as he’s concerned, he’s never encountered racial discrimination! At all. So there.